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Clay deputy awarded $178 million in lawsuit against Memorial Hospital

Clay Chandler was severely incapacitated after weight-loss surgery at the hospital in 2007.

Clay Chandler, shown before his bariatric surgery and stay at Memorial Hospital Jacksonville.

Attorney Tom Edwards (left) leans toward client Clay Chandler after Monday’s news conference, where it was announced that a jury awarded Chandler and his family $178 million in medical negligence and fraud damages against Memorial Hospital Jacksonville.

At 6-foot-1 and 375 pounds, Clay Chandler was an active lieutenant who was being heralded by Clay County Sheriff Rick Beseler as someone who might one day fill his shoes.

Although he had never failed a physical examination, it was recommended that Chandler consider weight-loss surgery, a procedure that he was told was less risky than continuing to live in his physical state.

But now brain damaged and confined to a wheelchair, Chandler broke down in tears Monday as he faced the media after a jury awarded him and his family approximately $178 million in medical negligence and fraud damages at the hands of Memorial Hospital Jacksonville.

And with that, the words of his attorney, Tom Edwards, became clearly evident.

“The tragic thing is that he understands what he was before and what he is now,” he said.

According to Edwards, Chandler was treated at Memorial from March to May 2007, admitted into the hospital to undergo a laparoscopic gastric bypass surgery. The day after his surgery, Chandler collapsed in respiratory failure and was placed into critical care, Edwards said.

For eight days Chandler showed signs of complication where fluids from the bowels leaked into the abdomen. Finally, his doctor, John DePeri, took him back into surgery where the leak was fixed.

Edwards said the hospital’s own expert witness even testified that most bariatric doctors would have taken Chandler back into surgery as soon as he showed symptoms and no later than the sixth day after his surgery.

By that point Chandler’s blood pressure dropped to the point he suffered a “low-flow stroke” in which the brain is not getting enough blood. He went comatose for more than two weeks.

While on a respirator, no lubricate eye drops were given to Chandler for weeks, burning his retina and causing permanent loss of eyesight, an oversight Edwards called “extraordinarily bad care.”

Chandler still suffers from a number of ailments and cannot speak intelligently and cannot walk, feed, clean and bathe himself.

“We believe this occurred because you had a relatively inexperienced doctor doing this surgery and managing the patient.”

Edwards went on to explain DePeri’s inexperience and how it failed to meet the hospital’s advertised accreditation, equating to fraud.

During the two-week trial, Memorial President James Wood testified that DePeri had performed at most 21 bariatric surgeries. To meet the standards of the American Society Bariatric Surgery’s Center of Excellence seal, he was required to have performed 50.

The seal also required that DePeri should have completed at least 20 hours of bariatric education courses, to which he had taken one class.

DePeri has since settled with the Chandlers, but Edwards said he agreed in the settlement not to disclose the datails. Now properly accredited, he is still performing bariatric surgeries at Memorial, Edwards said.

Back in 2007, that accreditation seal was being used on a series of pamphlets given to potential surgery patients of the hospital’s Bariatric Surgery Center, Edwards said. It was also found on many documents DePeri used when speaking at informational forums at the hospital.

The jury found that those pamphlets, and other advertising tools that contained the seal, were acts of fraud. In its verdict, the jury said the hospital knowingly allowed DePeri to perform paid surgeries he was not accredited for.

“We are saddened by what Mr. Chandler has experienced,” the hospital said in a statement released Monday. “While we sympathize with him and his family and respect the judicial process, we do not agree with the outcome of the case and intend to appeal.”

Another act of fraud was the hospital’s advertising of its bariatric center. Edwards said the ads sold an illusion that Memorial had a “team” of doctors and nurses committed to bariatrics. But when pre-paid patients arrived at the hospital, he said, it was another story.

“He [Chandler] shows up the day of the surgery and found in the middle of about 10 pages of documents is a paragraph that says ‘we are all independent and nobody’s a team,’ ” he said.

Edwards would not disclose how much of the award will go toward Chandler’s legal fees.

He said he was pleased by the award sum and the fact that Chandler, who has $250,000 a year in medical bills, will be taken care of for the rest of his life. But he said Chandler would trade it all to be the man he once was.